In 1937 a Sabena Junkers Ju 52 crashed in Ostend — the plane struck a factory chimney while attempting to land in thick fog. Everyone aboard was killed, including Princess Cecilie, the older sister of Prince Philip, later Duke of Edinburgh.
She had been eight months pregnant, and a newborn infant was discovered in the wreckage. It’s speculated that she had given birth during the flight, and that this had led the pilot to try to land in hazardous conditions.
While at Eton, Winston Churchill’s son Randolph was “immensely impressed” to hear his friend Freddie Furneaux recite the following passage without notes. Ostensibly it describes Henry VIII:
“This monarch was sincere, open, gallant, liberal, intrepid, inflexible and courageous; but with these virtues he combined the vices of violence, cruelty, profusion, rapacity, obstinacy, injustice, arrogance, presumption and conceit.”
When Churchill asked the source of the quotation, Furneaux said, “I had it from the headmaster of my private school, but he did not disclose where it came from.”
That’s from Churchill’s 1965 autobiography Twenty-One Years. The only other mention I can find is in Linda Kelly’s 2017 commonplace book Consolations, where she calls it a memory test and adds, “The test is to recite it by heart after looking at it once.” That’s all I’ve managed to learn.
05/22/2025 UPDATE: Reader Charlotte Fare found a variant of the quote in Volume III of David Hume’s History of England:
A catalogue of his vices would comprehend many of the worst qualities incident to human nature: Violence, cruelty, profusion, rapacity, injustice, obstinacy, arrogance, bigotry, presumption, caprice: But neither was he subject to all these vices in the most extreme degree, nor was he, at intervals altogether destitute of virtues: He was sincere, open, gallant, liberal, and capable at least of a temporary friendship and attachment.
(Thanks, Charlotte.)
Sydney Smith wrote a recipe for salad dressing:
Two boiled potatoes, strained through a kitchen sieve,
Softness and smoothness to the salad give;
Of mordant mustard take a single spoon —
Distrust the condiment that bites too soon;
Yet deem it not, thou man of taste, a fault,
To add a double quantity of salt.
Four times the spoon with oil of Lucca crown,
And twice with vinegar procured from town;
True taste requires it, and your poet begs
The pounded yellow of two well-boiled eggs.
Let onions’ atoms lurk within the bowl,
And, scarce suspected, animate the whole;
And lastly in the flavoured compound toss
A magic spoonful of anchovy sauce.
Oh, great and glorious! oh, herbaceous meat!
‘Twould tempt the dying anchorite to eat.
Back to the world he’d turn his weary soul,
And plunge his fingers in the salad bowl.
In the late 19th century, such rhymes helped cooks to master recipes. When this one was reproduced in an 1871 cookbook, many committed it to memory.
From Bismarck’s Reflections and Reminiscences, 1898:
At the time of my first stay at St. Petersburg, in 1859, I had an example of another Russian peculiarity. During the first spring days it was then the custom for every one connected with the Court to promenade in the Summer Garden between Paul’s Palace and the Neva. There the Emperor had noticed a sentry standing in the middle of a grass plot; in reply to the question why he was standing there, the soldier could only answer, ‘Those are my orders.’ The Emperor therefore sent one of his adjutants to the guard-room to make inquiries; but no explanation was forthcoming except that a sentry had to stand there winter and summer. The source of the original order could no longer be discovered. The matter was talked of at Court, and reached the ears of the servants. One of these, an old pensioner, came forward and stated that his father had once said to him as they passed the sentry in the Summer Garden: ‘There he is, still standing to guard the flower; on that spot the Empress Catherine once noticed a snowdrop in bloom unusually early, and gave orders that it was not to be plucked.’ This command had been carried out by placing a sentry on the spot, and ever since then one had stood there all the year round.
“Stories of this sort excite our amusement and criticism, but they are an expression of the elementary force and persistence on which the strength of the Russian nature depends in its attitude towards the rest of Europe.”
Examination questions from the final Classical Honours School at Oxford University, 1899 — “to have passed through it was the hallmark of a superbly educated man, and its graduates went on to rule the nation and, in that heyday of British imperialism, half the world too”:
“The general assumption was that a man who had mastered this range of thought and theory could master anything.”
From Jan Morris, The Oxford Book of Oxford, 1978.
The Moscow Radio announced that five million Russians filed past Josef Stalin’s bier in 72 hours. That means, according to the calculations of Frank Baker, a Mangum, Okla., accountant, that the mourners, two abreast, three and one third feet apart, ran past the bier at 22 miles an hour. Twenty-two miles an hour is 9.3 seconds a hundred yards, which is the world’s record for the 100-yard dash — heretofore recorded only by America’s Mel Patton.
— Associated Press, Sept. 24, 1953
An odd incident from the memoir of Lt. John Worsham of the 21st Virginia Infantry — during the Battle of Saunders Field in May 1864, two opposing soldiers found themselves in a gully and agreed to a fistfight to decide which had captured the other:
Then they decided that they would go into the road and have a regular fist and skull fight, the best man to have the other as his prisoner. When the two men came into the road about midway between the lines of battle, in full view of both sides around the field, one a Yankee, the other ‘a Johnny,’ while both sides were firing, they surely created a commotion! This was true in our line and I suppose in the enemy’s line, because both sides ceased firing! When the two men took off their coats and commenced to fight with their fists, a yell went up along each line, and men rushed to the edge of the opening for a better view! The ‘Johnny’ soon had the ‘Yank’ down, who surrendered, and both quietly rolled into the gully, where they remained until night, when ‘the Johnny’ brought ‘the Yank’ into our line. The disappearance of the two men was the signal for the resumption of firing!
This type of story is common, and I haven’t been able to confirm this one, but it’s certainly striking. “Such is war!”
These verses can be interpreted to support either the Stuarts or the Hanovers, according as they’re read. If each is addressed separately, from top to bottom, they’ll seem to support the Hanoverian regime; read together, right across the page, they declare for the Stuarts:
From Reuben Percy, Relics of Literature, 1823.
subagitate
v. to have sex with
verecund
adj. bashful; modest
reme
v. to cry or call out
cacoëpistic
adj. badly pronounced
[Sir Walter Raleigh] loved a wench well; and one time getting up one of the Mayds of Honour up against a tree in a Wood (’twas his first Lady) who seemed at first boarding to be something fearfull of her Honour, and modest, she cryed, sweet Sir Walter, what doe you me ask? Will you undoe me? Nay, sweet Sir Walter! Sweet Sir Walter! Sir Walter! At last, as the danger and the pleasure at the same time grew higher, she cryed in the extasey, Swisser Swatter Swisser Swatter. She proved with child, and I doubt not but this Hero tooke care of them both, as also that the Product was more than an ordinary mortal.
— John Aubrey, Brief Lives, 1697
When the news of [Richelieu’s] passing was brought to Urban VIII, the old Pope sat for a moment in pensive silence. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘if there is a God, Cardinal Richelieu will have much to answer for. If not, he has done very well.’
— Aldous Huxley, Grey Eminence, 1941